Xiaowei Yuan, Ziyang Huang, Zhao Yang Meituan, Yequan Wang Peking University and Beijing Academy of Artificial Intelligence, Jun Zhao Institute of automation, Chinese academy of science, Kang Liu Institute of automation, Chinese academy of science, Chinese Academy of Sciences
Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) has become a standard paradigm for grounding Large Language Models (LLMs) with external knowledge. However, RAG performance often degrades substantially when faced with noisy, outdated, or conflicting retrieved information. In this work, we empirically demonstrate that Prior-Guided Reasoning—a strategy that explicitly elicits the model’s parametric knowledge as prior information to guide reasoning on retrieved documents—effectively mitigates the impact of external conflicts. Building on this, we propose BrPr (Bernoulli-gated reinforcement learning for Prior-Guided reasoning), a framework that achieves robust performance across varying degrees of external inconsistency. Furthermore, by employing a Bernoulli-gated dropout mechanism during training, BrPr distills the prior-driven reasoning capability into the model parameters, enabling efficient latent reasoning without explicit prior generation. The experimental results demonstrate that BrPr consistently exhibits superior robustness to external conflicts and noise.
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cs.CL
Proceedings of the 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers) · 2026 · 正式发表
Jinhui Chen, Shizhu He Institute of automation, Chinese academy of science, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Xingchang Yang, Huanxuan Liao, Yequan Wang Peking University and Beijing Academy of Artificial Intelligence, Xiangwen Liao Fuzhou University, Wenhao Teng, Kang Liu Institute of automation, Chinese academy of science, Chinese Academy of Sciences 等 9 位作者
Enabling Large Language Models (LLMs) to evolve sustainably requires simultaneously preserving previously acquired knowledge (Past), effectively acquiring new task-specific skills (Present), and reserving sufficient parameter capacity for subsequent adaptation (Future). However, existing continual learning (CL) paradigms often prioritize immediate performance through dense updates, leading to catastrophic forgetting and rapid exhaustion of model capacity. To harmonize these conflicting demands, we draw inspiration from the brain’s functional partitioning and propose the Null-Space Constrained Parameter Region Specificity Method (PaRSP). PaRSP establishes a dynamic “Task-Region Mapping” that distinguishes between specialized neurons and generalist neurons. By precisely localizing a sparse “functional core” for each task, PaRSP restricts updates to specific regions via null-space orthogonality, preserving the vast majority of the network as an immutable “long-term memory bank.” This induced sparsity not only enhances plasticity via targeted adaptation and minimizes interference to ensure stability, but also strategically reserves substantial capacity, securing sustainability for future evolution. Extensive experiments validate PaRSP’s state-of-the-art performance, particularly on Standard CL and Long Sequence benchmarks, effectively harmonizing the stability-plasticity-sustainability trade-off. Code is available at https://github.com/JinhuiBot/PaRSP
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cs.CL
Proceedings of the 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers) · 2026 · 正式发表
Siqi Fan University of Electronic Science and Technology of China, Xiusheng Huang, Yiqun Yao Spin Matrix and Beijing Academy of Artificial Intelligence, Xuezhi Fang, Kang Liu Institute of automation, Chinese academy of science, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Peng Han University of Electronic Science and Technology of China, Shuo Shang University of Electronic Science and Technology of China, Aixin Sun Nanyang Technological University 等 9 位作者
Large language models (LLMs) can carry out human-like dialogue, but unlike humans, they are stateless due to the superposition property. However, during multi-turn, multi-agent interactions, LLMs begin to exhibit consistent, character-like behaviors—hinting at a form of emergent lifelong learning. Despite this, existing benchmarks often fail to capture these dynamics, primarily focusing on static, open-ended evaluations. To address this gap, we introduce LifeState-BENCH, a benchmark designed to assess lifelong learning in LLMs. It features two episodic datasets—Hamlet and a synthetic script collection—rich in narrative structure and character interactions. Our fact-checking evaluation probes models’ self-awareness, episodic memory retrieval, and relationship tracking, across both parametric and non-parametric approaches. Experiments on models like Llama3.1-8B, GPT-4-turbo, and DeepSeek R1, we demonstrate that non-parametric methods significantly outperform parametric ones in managing stateful learning. However, all models exhibit challenges with catastrophic forgetting as interactions extend, highlighting the need for further advancements in lifelong learning.
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cs.CL · cs.MA
Proceedings of the 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers) · 2026 · 正式发表
Xiusheng Huang, Zhe Li AMD, Xuanwu Yin Advanced Micro Devices, Lu Wang China Three Gorges Corporation, Yequan Wang Peking University and Beijing Academy of Artificial Intelligence, Dong Li, Emad Barsoum AMD, Kang Liu Institute of automation, Chinese academy of science, Chinese Academy of Sciences
Post-training quantization has emerged as a widely adopted technique for compressing and accelerating the inference of Large Language Models (LLMs). The primary challenges in LLMs quantization stem from activation outliers, which significantly degrade model performance especially at lower bit precision. While recent approaches attempt to mitigate outliers through linear transformations across feature dimensions, our analysis reveals that the transformed weights and activations still exhibit persistent outlier patterns with concentrated magnitude distributions. In this paper, we first model the mathematical relationship between quantization error and outliers, and then introduce a new metric Flatness to quantify the distribution of outliers. Based on this, we derive the theoretical optimal solution with respect to Flatness. Building on these insights, we propose Bidirectional Diagonal Quantization (BDQ), a novel post-training quantization framework that effectively disperses outlier patterns through optimized matrix transformations. BDQ strategically distributes outlier magnitudes across matrix dimensions via learned diagonal operations. Extensive experiments demonstrate that BDQ establishes a new quantization benchmark. It achieves less than 1% accuracy drop in W4A4 quantization on the LLaMA-3-8B model. In the more challenging W2A4KV16 experiment, compared to state-of-the-art approaches, BDQ reduces the performance gap by 39.1% on the DeepSeek-R1-Distill-LLaMA-70B model.
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cs.CL
Proceedings of the 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers) · 2026 · 正式发表
Huanxuan Liao, Shizhu He Institute of automation, Chinese academy of science, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Yupu Hao Institute of automation, Chinese academy of science, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Yequan Wang Peking University and Beijing Academy of Artificial Intelligence, Wenhao Teng, Xiangwen Liao Fuzhou University, Jun Zhao Institute of automation, Chinese academy of science, Kang Liu Institute of automation, Chinese academy of science, Chinese Academy of Sciences
Continual Learning (CL) for Large Language Models (LLMs) faces a fundamental Stability-Plasticity Dilemma: balancing the plasticity to acquire new capabilities with the stability to preserve prior knowledge. While Parameter-Efficient Fine-Tuning methods, such as LoRA, enable efficient adaptation, we identify a critical flaw in current approaches termed Rank-Blindness: the enforcement of a single rank constraint across diverse tasks, which entangles task-shared and task-specific knowledge, leading to catastrophic forgetting of earlier tasks and underfitting on complex new ones. To address this, we propose SpaRTA, a novel rehearsal-free framework guided by a rank-spectrum perspective that explicitly disentangles knowledge into two orthogonal subspaces. Specifically, SpaRTA employs a low-rank branch to capture task-shared representations and a high-rank branch to model task-specific features. To integrate these complementary representations, we introduce a context-aware dynamic router that adaptively fuses the two branches based on input semantics, while an explicit orthogonality constraint minimizes interference between shared and specific parameter subspaces. This design effectively isolates task-specific updates from shared knowledge, preventing the overwriting of prior capabilities while preserving strong adaptation capacity. Extensive experiments demonstrate that SpaRTA achieves a superior stability-plasticity balance compared to single-rank baselines. Notably, the proposed spectral disentanglement strategy substantially reduces inter-task interference and yields strong zero-shot generalization on unseen tasks. Our code will be available at https://github.com/Xnhyacinth/SpaRTA.
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cs.CL
Proceedings of the 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers) · 2026 · 正式发表
Wu Li Harbin Institute of Technology, Yigeng Zhou, Zesheng Shi Harbin Institute of Technology, Yequan Wang Peking University and Beijing Academy of Artificial Intelligence, Min Zhang Harbin Institute of Technology, Shenzhen and Harbin Institute of Technology, Jing Li Harbin Institute of Technology
While recent self-training approaches have reduced reliance on human-labeled data for aligning LLMs, they still face critical limitations: (i) sensitivity to synthetic data quality, leading to instability and bias amplification in iterative training; (ii) ineffective optimization due to a diminishing gap between positive and negative responses over successive training iterations. In this paper, we propose Team-based self-Play with dual Adaptive Weighting (TPAW), a novel self-play algorithm designed to improve alignment in a fully self-supervised setting. TPAW adopts a team-based framework in which the current policy model both collaborates with and competes against historical checkpoints, promoting more stable and efficient optimization. To further enhance learning, we design two adaptive weighting mechanisms: (i) a response reweighting scheme that adjusts the importance of target responses, and (ii) a player weighting strategy that dynamically modulates each team member’s contribution during training. Initialized from a SFT model, TPAW iteratively refines alignment without requiring additional human supervision. Experimental results demonstrate that TPAW consistently outperforms existing baselines across various base models and LLM benchmarks.
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cs.CL
Proceedings of the 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers) · 2026 · 正式发表